[Posted Fri 2 Oct]Chapter 40 - HOMES MAY BE FLAT Some time ago, I was visiting family south of Regina, where they have lived forever in flat little communities, among famously flat fields, in a piece of Canada as flat as Stephen Harper’s best joke, where even the wind gets lost, and you can expect to meet it anywhere.END OF BOOK

[Posted Tue 29 Sep]Chapter 9 - GOSHEN’S GREAT WHITECOAT HUNT By far the greatest success has been the development of mosquito-related products. There is skeeter oil; one drop in a teaspoon of Gingery Ale, gives you a buzz. There is skeeter cream, a virility enhancer, which, when rubbed on appropriate parts, creates a prickling sensation.

[Posted Fri 25 Sep]Chapter 38 - MARCH OF THE PENGUINSIs the day far off, when a contingent of Goshen gawkers, on a weekend excursion, will fly into one of the landing fields on the white continent? Some may even bring their motorized sleds. To chase a few penguins, perhaps.

[Posted Tue 22 Sep]Chapter 37 - PADDLE TO THE SEAThere were good times, yes, and adventure, and oft I ran aground, and tangled with nets, and drifted aimlessly. But, through luck, not to mention character, of which I know I have some, but through incredible, inexplicable, gratuitous luck, I pulled through.

[Posted Fri 18 Sep]Chapter 36 - SAVE THE LINGA
necropsy determined that the immature female died from dehydration, muscle
damage, and failing kidneys.It had not
fed for days, its favourite food being Atlantic deep squid.

[Posted Tue 15 Sep]Chapter 35 - WILD PARROTSThe
Britons are responding in traditional fashion - with scarecrows, and sound
blasters, and shotguns.At some point
they will no doubt find the magic bullet, and the parrots will be exterminated,
along with, quite possibly, a few native species.

[Posted Fri 11 Sep]Chapter 34 - THE MECHANICThese
last few years, Don stabled the [wood] splitter in a wood yard some distance
from his home.There, under a mantle of
snow, it dreams away the winter, warming itself with images of green brich and
sappy jack pine and moist poplar, and waiting for spring, and the touch of a
spanner.

[Posted Tue 8 Sep]

Chapter 33 - MR. DITHERS DOT LIB

[Resolution No. 8] I shall keep this great country of ours together if I
have to give in to every single demand from every single province and territory
and Toronto.

[Posted Fri 5 Sep]Chapter 32 - MERRY XXYet it
is undeniable that the Christmas holidays are a vast mishmash of Christian and
pagan traditions, and you will have no trouble finding Christians and pagans
who will defend to their dying breath such venerable traditions as Christmas
trees and Christmas cards and a good excuse for a drink.

[Posted Tue 1 Sep]
Chapter 31 - THE CHIEF CORNER-TREEThis year,
when I finally took a hard, unsentimental look at our Christmas tree, I noted
that it was bald on three sides.The one
branchy side, however, had done an expert comb-over, and projected an image of
a fully-follicled tree, if you looked at it head-on. It was perfect.

[Posted Fri 28 Aug]Chapter 30 - THE WINTERING PLACEThe
Danes were ill equipped to endure an Arctic winter.So the sixty-four Danes succumbed to scurvy,
and in his journal, Jens Munk meticulously recorded each death.On the 30th of March, 1620, upon recording
the 29th death, Munk wrote the line, I
was then like a wild and lonely bird.

[Posted Tue 25 Aug]Chapter 29 - ROMANCING THE STONESYou
know, in 1885, Riel had tried to reprise his Manitoba success.These guys here today [at the graveside
ceremony] were the same guys, the very same guys that had run him to ground at
Batoche.And now he was their prophet.

[Posted Fri 21 Aug]Chapter 28 - BOMBS, AWAY!Terrorists are a fact of life.Like poverty.And
peculation.And pedophilia.And they often come in rashes, like measles,
and scandals, and hurricanes. The
suicide terrorist has nobody to live for.Ergo, he is inferior.

[Posted Tue 18 Aug]Chapter 27 -THE INUKSHUK CONSPIRACYOlga
insisted that I build one for her garden, and I spent a day at it, selecting
the stones, rejecting the less personable ones, and balancing the benevolent
ones.Our inukshuk is, I grant you, a
waif-like figure, but it has borne the onslaught of many winters now.

[Posted Fri 14 Aug]Chapter 26 - MY COUNTRY IS WINTER8. You
know that winter has come when the sun comes up in the east and stays there.

9. You
know that winter has come when the smiles on the pumpkins freeze.

[Posted Tue 11 Aug]Chapter 25 - MY OLD HOUSEBut the
house was a-gettin’ old.The shingles
were loose, and the floorboards were warped, and window was, sadly,
broken.It was, I suppose, an unlovely
house.Just like me.And many of the houses in Red Rock do date
back a half century or more.Just like
me.

[Posted Fri 7 Aug]Chapter 24 - CHARITY HURTSYou,
too, can be kind to the caribou.There’s
an October fund-raiser in the Sunny State [California].You are invited to come out and sip
delectable local wines, and quaff tasty micro-brews, and nibble on gourmet
chocolates.I wish I were kidding.And
their website has a button you may very kindly push.

[Posted Tue 4 Aug]Chapter 23 - CIVIL WAR BUFFSWe’ve
got the Goshen Hotel (well, it’s been demolished, but we can show you the
vacant lot where it used to stand), and in the back room, the magistrate, Judge
Jeremiah, heard drunk and disorderly cases.Sure, he dozed through some of them, but still, in those days, the Judge
logged a lot of hours.There’s no tab
there now.

[Posted Fri 31 Jul]Chapter 22 - BAMBISome of
the true hunters I know are the most gentle people on earth.Like true fishers and trappers and loggers,
they respect the lives they take.For
them, a walk in the woods is a meditation.When the fall of the year arrives, the hunter puts on his ceremonial
robe, and clutching his staff of office, steps into nature.

[Posted Tue 28 Jul]Chapter 21 - A PECKERHEAD POLICYAny
citizen who feels menaced by a woodpecker trying, say, to peck its way through
a windowpane, is urged to call the Woodpecker Wise hotline.Someone will answer the phone within
twenty-four days.Then follows a series
of skill-testing questions . . .

[Posted Fri 24 Jul]Chapter 20 - THE TRUE CROSSUnder the aegis of the Roman Church, the rules evolved for the veneration of relics.Veneration is the operative word.Adoration is a no-no.Veneration is for things, adoration is for people - living or dead - for a relic is not a person, and a person is not the thing.In my case, I adore Thoreau, but I only venerate his rocks.

[Posted Tue 21 Jul]Chapter 19 - STAND OF TREESWhat
can a tree do about themÉIt can hardly
swat the pesky little critters.It can
neither nurse its infections nor doctor its wounds.And it can’t relocate to a more healthful
neighbourhood.

[Posted Fri 17 Jul]Chapter 18 - THE BUTTERFLY EFFECTThe
accuracy of NWS forecasts is plus or minus 90 percent for the probability of
weather, from zero to sixty seconds for the advance warnings of flash floods,
and a forgivable error of 175 miles for the landfall of an Atlantic hurricane,
just before your house is airborne.This
beats the heck out of Grandpa’s weather gauge - his arthritic elbow.

[Posted Tue 14 Jul]Chapter 17 - GARDENERS ALLOur
mission, should we choose to accept it, is to pick a patch of Earth and
cultivate it.It may be a family that we
choose, to plant it, weed it, and watch it mature.It may be a budgerigar that depends on us for
water and seed.It may be a potted
cactus . . .

[Posted Fri 10 Jul]Chapter 16 - THE GOSHEN CATNAPPERWhat
was the crime of Sisyphus?One tradition
has it that he was a bandit, who murdered travelers.In the modern era, the reputation of Sisyphus
has achieved heroic status, for his punishment is disproportionate to the
crime.There is no record of his having
ever napped cats.

[Posted Tue 7 Jul]Chapter 15 - OLD FOSSILSI would
like to believe that somewhere in Germany, there is a little oaken chest, sitting
in a chimney corner, and in that chest is a scrap of brown butcher paper, and
poem beings, Live on! my photos and
poetry, / Keep telling the pleasures we had, / Of love and our fond
aspirations, / And our home life with Mother and Dad.

[Posted Fri 3 Jul]Chapter 14 - THE DAM CONSEQUENCESThe
power from the High Falls plant was going to expand the Ontario grid. But the plant generates no power.A design flaw, it seems, killed the
generation.

[Posted Tue 30 Jun]Chapter 13 - NEBUCHITA MOSQUITAYou may have thought that the codfish was the
mascot of Newfoundland, but it is, as I said, the missing elk.Still, there are many confirmed cod sightings
each year.As soon as one is sighted,
there is a general rush to the scene, and the cod is promptly consumed, liver
and oil.

[Posted Fri 26 Jun]Chapter 12 - THE YELLOW PERILTime to nail up the sky.Now, you forge the nail.You use your intelligence and ingenuity and
artifice and you forge that nail.I’ll
hold the nail in place.I’ll use my
philosophical orientation and critical faculty and sense of the ridulous and
I’ll hold that nail.

[Posted Tue 23 Jun]Chapter 11 - WILD BY NATUREWhere I live, there are no wild horses.Okay, no feral horses.There are only wild cats.Okay, feral cats.Feral cats are an opportunity to practice
civic virtue and to nourish the wild part of our nature.

[Posted Fri 19 Jun]Chapter 10 - ON YOUR LONESOMECome to think of it, there is just too much
self-interest in these blowhards.Their
blusters and bellows are not the honest blasts of genuine whistleblowers.

[Posted Tue 16 Jun]Chapter 9 - A GOOD KILLSome centres are resorting to mass
euthanasia.The geese are captured
during the molt and marched at gunpoint to the ovens.

[Posted Fri 12 Jun]Chapter 8 - THE LORD GOD BIRDI placed the chain of links about my neck, and
I strutted around the yard . . . exultant . . . exuberant . . . ecstatic . . .
because for that moment I was Lord of the Uni-verse, with galaxies bobbing in
my bloodstream.

[Posted Tue 9 Jun]Chapter 7 - MONUMENTS OF SANDThere is a school of thought that says that the
Buddhas of Bamiyan should not be restored.The empty niches should remain as an eternal memorial to religious
bigotry.

[Posted Tue 2 Jun]Chapter 5 - THE FIRST ROSEYou know that spring has sprung when the worm
in the rose sheds its woolies and wriggles its toes in pure pleasure.

[Posted Fri 29 May]Chapter 4 - SHADOW AND LIGHTThe presiding pastor, fortified with locusts
and wild honey, and clad in polyester skins, issued a resounding call to
repentance.But the throng was
unmoved.The pastor was no Jesus, for as
we all know, Jesus was a great man.

[Posted Tue 26 May]Chapter 3 - FRUIT OF THE VINEWe have merely peeked into the cauldron in
which the tomato wars seethe.The names,
the colours, the shapes, the shelf life, the squishiness or lack thereof, and
last as well as least, the taste, will be choosing sides and forming alliances
and battering it out for centuries to come.

[Posted Fri 22 May]Chapter 2 - LAND O’ GOSHENIn more recent times, this entrepreneurial
community undertook a great engineering project, viz, paving the entire floor
of the lake with pulpwood.Fishermen who
bring up bits on their pulp hooks say the wood will burn with a frigid blue
flame.

[Posted Wed 20 May]Chapter 1 - CORNER GAS IIGoshen, too, is advancing with the times.The women now sit on the men’s side in the
beer parlours and, if they want to, use the urinals.In the business section, the hitching posts
have been removed, and on Sundays there is unrestricted parking.

[Posted Fri 15 May]Title StoryOh Frank the most marvelous thing I paused at
you know the intersection of our lives and I looked left you know to Goshen
schools and Goshen churches and the New Age centre and then I looked right to
Goshen hospital and Goshen clinic and Goshen day care and the Goshen olden age
home and then I looked back to you Frank and to our daughter Frank and our
lives Frank . . .